Boundary Layer Adaptivity for Transonic Turbulent Flows

Simulations of turbulent flows are challenging and require tight and varying mesh spacings near the walls that depend on the turbulence models used. Semi-structured meshes are often used in the turbulent wall boundary layers due to their ability to be strongly graded and anisotropic. To reduce the discretization errors in the solution, an adaptive approach becomes essential due to the lack of good a priori error indicators. Properties of the turbulent boundary layers can be directly calculated from the flow physics and can be used to guide adaptivity. This paper introduces a new approach for adaptivity of the mesh boundary layers using flow physics indicators, in combination with classical numerical error indicators. The effectiveness of the adaptive techniques is analyzed by applying them to transonic flow problems with shock wave and boundary layer interactions.